Pankaj Mishra & Jayadevan PK, ET Bureau Nov 26, 2014, 02.38PM IST
BENGALURU: He can chalk out eloquent policies to make better use of technology in governance, reel programming jargon like a techie or even hunker down and code through the night.
Among bureaucrats in Delhi, Ram Sewak Sharma is an exception. "He can write code as well as the best software folks I know," said Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani, who led the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) where Sharma was his top hand. At UIDAI, Sharma was employee number two and Nilekani was the first employee. The two men worked side by side for nearly four years to bring Aadhaar, the world's largest biometric database, to life in record time.
| As the secretary of information technology, Sharma now spearheads key policies that are part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India initiative."Coding is my hobby," said Sharma, who has been programming since the mideighties when he got his first computer. |
Nilekani, who not so long ago at Infosys had some of the country's top IT leaders reporting to him, calls Sharma "extremely dynamic," and "a quick decision-maker willing to take risks." Indeed, unlike many top bureaucrats who take a mid-career break to learn public policy in the United States, Sharma studied Masters in Computer Science at UC Riverside with classmates half his age in 2000. At the time, Sharma was 45 years old.
"All my kids were studying, and I was also studying," jokes Sharma, who has four children.
While at Aadhaar, Nilekani dealt with the external world and Sharma toiled within the organisation that was created to give a unique identification number to over a billion people.
Sharma even wrote the first version of a client software that was used to enrol people into the Aadhaar database.
"He was truly the Aadhaar of Aadhaar," said Nilekani.
There isn't much time to code these days. But his coding prowess and understanding of systems help him implement solutions better. A few months ago, the IT department rolled out a biometric attendance management system which caught much attention from the press.
The Aadhaar-based solution, built by a team of three working under Sharma, can monitor and report staff attendance in real time.
Last week, the BJP government said that it will roll out the attendance system across all central government offices in the country by the next Republic Day.
"In a world where officers keep moving on, he hangs in and builds on projects," said Srikanth Nadhamuni, the chief executive officer of Khosla Labs.
Nadhamuni, who has worked on the UIDAI project, says that Sharma is a combination of somebody who "understands real world problems and can deliver a solution at India scale".
The big plan now is to bring Narendra Modi government's Digital India vision to fruition.
"It's a government-wide initiative to re-engineer business processes," said Sharma, who has a reputation of turning up promptly at 9:00 am for work.
The focus is on better citizen service delivery using technology and the department of information technology is the co-ordinating agency for the Digital India plan.
"He spends time and effort on understanding technology and not just managing it," said Lalitesh Katragadda, former country head of products at Google India. "One thing that makes Google successful is that the leadership understands technology. And that's the culture Sharmaji is bringing to the game," he said.
The career bureaucrat did not grow up wanting to be a government official. Inspired by renowned physicist Meghnad Saha's career, young Sharma wanted to become a scientist.
He was born in a family of well-to-do farmers, close to Faridabad in a backward village where there was no primary school until a few years ago.
"I had to cycle 10 kilometres everyday to school," recalls Sharmawho went on to study at the Allahabad University where Saha was once a professor. "That changed my life.If I was in Faridabad, things would have been different," said Sharma, who grew up with three brothers and four sisters.
Worried that he would marry someone outside his caste, his family didn't allow him to go abroad for studies and Sharma ended up at the IIT Kanpur to do his masters in Mathematics in 1976.
The next year, he decided to join the civil services and has worked in various capacities in the government.
From his days at IIT and early career as a bureaucrat in what has now come to be known as the licence Raj, much has changed.
India has over 900 million mobile phone connections, millions of Internet users, ecommerce is reaching smaller towns and investors are betting big on the country's growing startups.
The new government is now talking about a massive plan to make use of technology to deliver citizen services.
One of the first steps to make the Digital India initiative successful is to develop policy frameworks and Sharma is already at work on these.
The government has readied a policy that encourages the use of open source software, Sharma told ET earlier this month.
The policy will also seek to create a GitHub-like repository of software that can be collaboratively developed. "It will help us reduce duplication of efforts and save us time and effort," said Sharma.
Another core element of the Digital India initiative is to digitise millions of government records pertaining to the citizen and host it on the cloud.
Once implemented, departments can access people's records without making them run around for physical copies. "Maybe we can provide you with a digital locker where you can keep all your certificates," he said.
Sharad Sharma who cofounded software product think thank iSpirt and works closely with the government on several issues, said, "He is able to combine government expertise with pro-bono private-sector expertise in a way that hasn't been done before."
"His lasting legacy would be a long overdue revamp of the eGov architecture to yield citizen-friendly applications," he added.
Now at the fag end of his career, Ram Sewak Sharma wants to see some of the government's ambitious initiatives through.
"More process reforms, digitisation of citizen documents and financial inclusion championed by the government will be transformational," said Sharma, who is a trusted hand of Union Minister for Information Technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. "They seem to share such a great relationship which makes things work," said Katragadda, who has met the duo a few times.
